Thanks — I hear your frustration with inconsistent date formats. I can help get your Agent to produce the exact date format you want, but I need a bit more context to give targeted steps. Could you share the following so I can diagnose and fix this quickly? 1. Which Agent or product are you using (for example: a LiveKit bot, a custom model wrapper, an LLM like OpenAI/Anthropic, or something else)? 2. A copy of the strict prompt you give (exact text). 3. A few real examples of the Agent’s outputs showing the different formats (e.g., "march 19th 2020", "march 19th twenty twenty", "03/19/2020"). 4. Where are these dates coming from? (Is the Agent generating them from raw date objects, parsing user input, or formatting values from a database/API?) 5. Is the Agent expected to always output in one format (please specify the exact desired format, e.g.,

YYYY-MM-DD

,

MM/DD/YYYY

,

March 19, 2020

, or

March 19th, 2020

)? While you gather that, here are a few general suggestions that often fix this: • Be explicit in the prompt with a single formatting rule and one canonical example, e.g., “Always format dates exactly like

YYYY-MM-DD

— for example:

2020-03-19

. Do not use words, ordinal suffixes, or slashes.” • Add a hard constraint in the instruction, e.g., “If you cannot format the date exactly, respond with the single token

INVALID_DATE_FORMAT

.” That discourages the model from improvising. • If you control the post-processing layer, return structured data instead of free text (for example JSON with a

date

field). Have the model output a machine-parseable date like

{"date":"2020-03-19"}

— then format for display in your app. • If the Agent is parsing human input into dates, use a deterministic date parser library (e.g., dateutil, chrono) and then re-format to your canonical form before returning. • If the model is hallucinating formats, add a short validation step in your pipeline that checks the output against a regex for your required format and re-prompts or corrects if it doesn’t match. Share the prompt and examples you mentioned and I’ll: • Point out what in the prompt might allow variability, • Give a tightened prompt you can copy-paste, • Or provide a small post-processing snippet (regex or code) to enforce the format you want., with interactive elements